Progressive Jackpot is the special jackpot video slot feature, where the total jackpot increases with every new game, unless there’s someone to win it. It takes only a minuscule percentage of each bet you place to sort of fuel the jackpot and make it bigger. On September 28, 2018, a record-breaking progressive jackpot win of €18,915,721 was triggered by an anonymous player on the Mega Moolah slot by Microgaming at Grand Mondial online casino. There are flat top slot machines, and there are progressive slot machines. A flat-top slot machine is more common, and it’s a game where the top prize is a fixed amount. 1,000 coins is a common prize, but it varies by machine. Progressive slot machines, on the other hand, have top prizes (jackpots) that grow over time until they’re hit. The progressive slot machine is set to let players win big amount of cash upon successful. It is natural for this form of laptop to have a huge amount of jackpot prize as a result of this desktop is interconnected with the other progressive machines.

When it comes to slot machines, you have two broad categories. There are flat top slot machines, and there are progressive slot machines.

A flat-top slot machine is more common, and it’s a game where the top prize is a fixed amount. 1,000 coins is a common prize, but it varies by machine.

Progressive slot machines, on the other hand, have top prizes (jackpots) that grow over time until they’re hit. They can be compared to lottery games in that respect. You know how the lottery gets bigger every week if there was no winner the previous week? Hitting the progressive on jackpot on real money slot machines is just like that.

How Big Does the Jackpot Get on a Progressive Slot Machine?

The obvious first question is, how big does the jackpot on a progressive slot machine get? The answer is that it varies based on the game.

You can find progressive jackpots that rival lottery prizes in size. The Megabucks slots in Nevada have the biggest progressive slot machine jackpot in the world. The jackpot starts at $10 million and grows until someone hits it.

When I wrote this post, the jackpot was at $15 million and growing. The biggest the jackpot ever got was in 2003, when it had risen to almost $40 million before getting hit. It’s also gotten as big as $35 million before being hit, too. But that’s on the outside end of the spectrum.

Willy Wonka Progressive Slot Win

Progressive jackpots can also be much smaller, depending on the casino and the specific game. You can find plenty of progressive jackpots on the other end of the spectrum, too. Online progressives can be as low as $500 or $600.

The advantage to lower-sized progressive jackpots is that you’re more likely to win one. The odds of winning something like Megabucks are astronomically small.

What Does a Progressive Jackpot Do to the Expected Return?

If you’re not familiar with the expression, the “expected return” for a slot machine is the percentage of the money you get back in the long run when playing the machine. It’s expressed as a percentage, and it’s always less than 100%.

Here’s what that means: If you have a slot machine with an expected total return of 94%, you expect to get back 94 cents for every dollar you put into the machine.

If you’re an average slot machine player, you might make 500 spins per hour. If you’re playing for a dollar per spin, you’re putting $500 through the machine per hour.

94% of $500 is $470, which means you’ll lose an average of $30 per hour on that machine.

That’s no guarantee, by the way. That’s an average you can expect in the long run, over dozens of hours. In the short term, you might see an hour or a session where you were up $30 or even $300. You might see other hours or sessions where you lost $60 or $120 or even more. That’s why it’s random.

The Size of the Jackpot Has an Effect on the Actual Return

The actual return on a machine is the actual amount you get back. This is opposed to the theoretical return on the machine, which is what most people mean when they talk about expected return.

But when you’re dealing with a jackpot that has such a low probability of being hit, its theoretical return might as well be zero. After all, if the probability is so close to zero that you might not expect to hit it in a lifetime of play, it might as well not even count.

Megabucks is a good example. The odds of winning the jackpot are about 1 in 50,000,000. How long would it take to make 50,000,000 spins on Megabucks?

At 500 spins per hour, you’re looking at 100,000 hours of play. If you played Megabucks 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, you’d get in 2,000 hours of play. That’s 50 years of playing Megabucks as a full-time job.

No one I know would want to spend 50 years playing for that jackpot. So, you might as well subtract the expected value for the jackpot from the overall expected return for the game.

Usually, this means that the expected return for a big progressive jackpot is effectively lower than it would be if you were playing a flat top slot machine game.

What Kinds of Progressive Jackpot Slot Machines Are There?

I mentioned before that I like to categorize things, and I’ve found that categorizing progressive slot machines is easy. You have three types:

1. Individual machines
2. Local area-networked machines
3. Wide area-networked machines

An individual machine with a progressive jackpot has a jackpot that grows as you play it. The jackpot also grows when someone else plays it. But it doesn’t grow when it’s not being played. A percentage of each bet “fuels” that jackpot, so the jackpot ticker doesn’t move when no one is playing the game.

It’s a jackpot ticket for an individual machine. Local area-networked machines are slot machines in a single casino and sometimes in the same bank where your play on any of the networked machines that fuels the jackpot. When someone on any of the networked machines wins, the jackpot resets to its original amount.

Generally, the gambling games with the biggest jackpots are wide area machines, and the games with the smallest jackpots are the individual machines.

What Happens When You Gamble and Win a Jackpot?

First, the machines don’t pay out immediately in coins when you win a progressive jackpot. Such a payoff would be impractical.

A flashing light usually goes off on a progressive jackpot machine when it’s hit, and a slot machine attendant will visit you. The casino will set things up for you so that you get paid. If it’s a huge jackpot like Megabucks, it’s similar to winning the lottery.

You don’t just get a check handed to you. But you do get paid. Also, keep in mind that gambling winnings are taxable income. The casino will provide you with an earnings report. You should keep a diary of your gambling expenses so that if you do win big, you can defray at least some of the taxes you owe with these expenses.

You can’t defray expenses unless you’re a winning player, though, and you can never claim more in losses than you’ve won in a calendar year.

This is true for any United States casinos, and it applies to any winnings at the casino over a specific amount. Small wins like $50 are no big deal and don’t get reported, but once you get into progressive jackpot territory, they definitely get reported.

How Do You Win Progressive Jackpot Casino Slot Machines?

There’s no magic trick to winning at progressive slots. They’re like the lottery. No amount of superstition or astrology can help you win. You just have to get lucky.

It also doesn’t matter where the slot machine is located in the casino. For years, people have suggested that the loosest slot machines are the ones nearest the walkways in the casinos, but that’s just one of the common casino myths. It might have had some basis in truth at one time. But as far as I know, no casino or casino manager makes it that easy to spot the “loose” progressive slots.

Progressive Slot Winning Videos

Conclusion

Hitting the jackpot with progressive slot machines is something most of us will never achieve. If you do become a progressive jackpot winner, it will probably be on one of the games with the smaller jackpots—the individual machines.

Still, it’s fun to watch the jackpot ticker grow constantly, and it’s even more fun to daydream about what you’re going to do when you win all that money.

Slot machines account for nearly three-fourth of the space in any Vegas casino. In fact, slot games are the most distilled essence of gambling: high rewards for high risks. So all online casinos and gambling platforms tend to have an exclusive section with a library of slot games. Slot games are also the easiest to play, and you do not need to learn any complex mechanics.

What Makes Progressive Slots Different?

Slot games are by design very plug-and-play and entertaining in nature. Sadly, they are also the least reliable if you want to actually make money. Since they take practically no skill to play, unlike something like poker, they also have a much higher house advantage than poker. The house advantage is basically the higher percentage of money the casino earns than it pays out. It is baked into slot games because if you pool together the cost of spinning reels everyone pays, it is much higher than the average payout a lucky person gets. And this is where progressive slots come in.

A normal slot machine – or any video slot game, for that matter – has a very specific set of combinations that count as jackpots. As you can imagine, the chances of getting a jackpot are rare. But if you are lucky enough to hit it, the payout is much, much higher than the average combo reward. So the very idea is that people will keep playing in the hope of hitting that small chance because the bulk payout is so huge.

Now, at its core mechanics, progressive slot games do not really differ much. But the one thing it adds changes the scope and scale in a big way: a dynamic jackpot. Like a regular slot game, a progressive jackpot starts out at a base fixed value, but it increases over time.

How Does The Progressive Jackpot Change?

Basically, every time you spin the reel and it does not hit the jackpot, the jackpot changes in value. In a physical slot machine, it means that everyone who tries their luck with the spins and gets any other result than the jackpot, the cost of their spin adds up to the jackpot.

So over time, it keeps growing until someone hits the jackpot. Then they take the current value of the jackpot as payout. And the jackpot then reverts to its base value until the next spin. Now, standalone progressive slots work is comparatively rare. For further explanation, one needs to know the other big difference from a regular slot game. That is, progressive slot games are commonly a part of a wider network.

This, of course, goes without saying for online slot games. But even real-life casinos have ‘local progressive jackpots.’ In this, all the slot machines are wired together in a network, and every spin on every machine adds to the jackpot value. As you can imagine, daily hits on hundreds of machines bloat the jackpot exponentially and easily. This is even greater online, in a ‘wide area network progressive.’ The way these jackpots are calculated can vary from one online casino to another. But generally, it involves a connection between multiple games, and every paid click from individual users adds to the jackpot value.

How Are The Odds On A Progressive Slot?

Let’s start out with the basics of winning in slot games. How do you determine the profitability of an online slot game? Simple: by looking at its RTP. This is the average percentage of your investment that you recover in the long run as you play. But if you look at the possibility of winning a jackpot, it is much lower. On the average slot game, it is something like 1 in a 100 – which puts our chances at 0.0001%.

With the progressive slot game, the actual game you play does not really change. So, you still have the same chances of winning the jackpot. However, you must note that some online casinos make the jackpot even more difficult to attain in a progressive jackpot version of the game. So it is always the wiser thing to check the odds on the game before you start spinning.

So, is your money better spent on classic slot games or progressive ones? Here is the big nuance: you are not playing for the regular jackpot, but a progressive one. Imagine that no one has won a jackpot in a long time, and it has hit a large amount. But someone else wins the jackpot before you do, it resets to a regular value.

If you win afterward, you do not get much more than you would in a classic slot game. So the real chances of winning big on progressive slots are actually much lower. But if luck is on your side, you can go for it!

Try your luck with JeetWin’s progressive slots. Register now and play to India’s leading online casino.